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Cookies, Cakes, and Doughnuts: Pour
1/4 cupful butter 1/2 teaspoonful ginger 1/2 teaspoonful soda 1/4 teaspoonful salt Rind and juice 1/2 lemon 1/2 cupful butter Pour the batter into a well-buttered pan, and bake fifty minutes. This a 6 a, Dover Egg-beater: b, Grater: c. Omelet Pan. makes one small loaf. This cake may be put away to be used as a pudding when convenient. Steam it an hour, and serve with a wine sauce. It is almost as good as a plum pudding.
Maple-Sugar Gingerbread. 1 egg, 1 cupful thick maple sirup, 2 cupfuls flour, cupful sour milk, cupful butter, teaspoonful ginger, teaspoonful soda, teaspoonful salt, Rind and juice lemon.
Beat the butter to a cream, and add the sirup and flavoring. Dissolve the soda in 1 tablespoonful cold water and stir into the sour milk. Add this and the egg well beaten to the other ingredients, then the flour. Beat well; pour into a buttered pan. This quantity will make one small loaf or a thin sheet. If baked in a loaf, leave in oven fifty minutes; if in a sheet, twenty-five minutes. - MISS PARLOA.
Holiday Cake. 1 cupful butter, 1 cupful sugar, 1 cupful molasses, ½ teaspoonful salt, 1 teaspoonful mixed spices, 1 egg, 1 cupful sour milk, 1 teaspoonful soda, Flour, 1 cupful raisins and currants, Small quantity citron.
Mix together the butter, sugar, molasses, salt, spices, and egg; beat well, then add the sour milk with the soda stirred in, and flour enough to make quite thick; add the raisins, currants, and citron. This makes two medium loaves, and will keep for weeks.
Marble Layer Cake. cake Runkel's Chocolate, 1 teaspoonful baking soda, cupful warm water, 2 cupfuls maple sugar, 2 eggs, cupful butter, 1 cupful sour milk, 2½ cupfuls flour.
Melt the chocolate over hot water, dissolve the soda in the warm water; beat the butter to a cream. Add the eggs beaten without separating, and beat in gradually the sugar-beat for at least ten minutes. Pour the soda and water in the sour milk; add this with the melted chocolate to the egg mixture; now stir in the flour. Beat and bake in three layers. When cold, put together with maple or caramel filling.
Four cake recipes run together here, with the tail of a fifth at the top and a stray illustration caption dropped into the middle by the scanner. The fractions have largely been lost in transcription, so read the ingredient lists as guides rather than gospel.
- Missing fractionsEvery entry shows bare "cupful" or "teaspoonful" where the original printed a fraction — "cupful sour milk," "cupful butter," "teaspoonful ginger." These are genuinely ambiguous and cannot be recovered from the text. For the gingerbread, 1/2 cup sour milk and 1/2 cup butter give a workable batter, but that is a reconstruction, not the printed recipe.
- Oven heatNo temperatures are given because these were wood- and coal-range recipes; the book supplies no oven description here at all. Around 350F is a workable modern equivalent: a 50-minute loaf and a 25-minute sheet both suit that heat, and layers for the marble cake want roughly 20 to 25 minutes.
- Sour milk and sodaSour milk here means naturally soured raw milk, acidic enough to react with the soda. Use cultured buttermilk, or whole milk with a tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar per cup, left to stand ten minutes. Modern pasteurised milk left on the counter spoils rather than souring cleanly, and is not a reliable substitute.
- Runkel's ChocolateRunkel Brothers sold unsweetened baking chocolate in cakes. The quantity here has been lost along with the fraction, and the size of a "cake" varied by maker, so any figure is a reconstruction: about 2 oz unsweetened chocolate suits a three-layer cake of this size. Use unsweetened rather than a sweetened bar, which would throw the sugar out.
- The marble cake is not marbled as writtenThe chocolate goes into the whole batter, which yields a plain chocolate layer cake. To get the marbling the name promises, reserve about a third of the batter before adding the chocolate, then spoon the two mixtures into the pans alternately and cut through once with a knife.
- Maple sugar and maple syrup"2 cupfuls maple sugar" means maple sugar, which in this period was often sold in hard cakes to be shaved or grated; granulated maple sugar sold today works directly. "Thick maple sirup" is the darker, heavier grades — Grade A Dark or Very Dark in today's labelling, not the pale table syrup.
- The ten-minute beatingTen minutes' beating by hand amounts to a few minutes in a stand mixer on medium. Beating well past the point of lightness only warms the butter and slackens the batter.
- Mixed spicesThe Holiday Cake's "mixed spices" is the period equivalent of pumpkin-pie spice: cinnamon leading, with clove, nutmeg and allspice or mace behind it. One teaspoon total is modest for two loaves; two is closer to modern expectations.
- Flour "enough to make quite thick"For the Holiday Cake this works out at roughly 3 to 3 1/2 cups — a stiff batter that holds the fruit in suspension rather than letting it sink. Toss the raisins, currants and citron in a spoonful of the measured flour before folding them in.
- Cake as puddingThe steaming instruction at the top belongs to the recipe on the preceding page, not to the gingerbread; what that cake was cannot be told from this fragment. A period wine sauce is a simple sweetened sauce, usually enriched with butter and flavoured with sherry or Madeira.
The batch is held together by two sweeteners common in northeastern kitchens of the period: molasses and maple. Maple sugar was still a farm commodity sold in cakes and tubs, and cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s treated it as an everyday baking sugar rather than a luxury, which is why a gingerbread and a layer cake here both lean on it. The gingerbread is credited to Maria Parloa, who ran a cooking school in Boston and wrote some of the most widely reprinted American cookery books of the period; here her name appears on a recipe carried inside someone else's compilation. The reliance on sour milk and soda rather than baking powder marks these as recipes formed before commercial baking powder had fully displaced the older chemistry, and "Runkel's Chocolate" \— Runkel Brothers of New York \\\— is the sort of brand-name instruction that shows how ordinary packaged groceries had become in the household kitchen.